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Gosh, I must be doing something wrong. I spent 15 minutes (of which a lot was waiting while it was thinking about "backwards rationalising" it's decision and "gaslighting"[1]) arguing with it over why it keeps using `node -e "console.log(require('fs').readdirSync('…'))"` instead of `ls -l …`.

Like it did everything:

- this is not a Linux system (true, it was macOS) - it is not an available command - the binary is corrupted - node/js is more precise - V8 JavaScript is faster than bash (true technically??? But not in this context lol) - JavaScript is more versatile

I forgot what else we went through but there were a few more things. I indulged it because it was incredulous and funny. The prompts from my side were all questions, never instructions. I assume an instruction would've helped here, but also I don't think Opus ever did this (but on the other hand Opus wrote python scripts to format/indent, instead of just running cargo fmt, so I guess potato potato)

Gosh, that seems like a conclusion someone came to using AI lol.

I agree that intuition is important, and that it's sometimes easier to develop correct intuition without a conflicting bias/habit, BUT... I don't think traditional engineering skills conflict with using AI tools. If anything it's more important, but maybe that's just the recently sprouted gay hair on my head talking

Lol... I noticed it does weird stuff sometimes. I'll see it generate a python script inline on the CLI to edit files. Like... Yo what the fuck? It literally used the edit tool until 5 turn ago.

Also, it'll run a formatter, read, edit to undo auto formatting and then continue on its merry way. What is the point of that??? Lol

What?

It's an algorithm (albeit an expensive one) designed to produce engaging output. It's not a doctor, it's definitely not more capable than experts in their fields. It's not replacing anyone, same way pocket calculators didn't replace people 50 years ago.

Unless you're being sarcastic because of all the fearmongering in news? In that case, the joke went over my head lol

The achievements of thousands of of agents vibe coding in parallel. Marvellous, simply marvellous. And the news fearmonger how AI will replace jobs. Lol

I'm 99% sure my old boss was pasting Slack messages in and out of ChatGPT. Some people are feral with this AI bullshit

Yes, but if chokemegently420 on some random sub Reddit gave them that advice, nobody would be the wiser. It's not like ChatGPT is a certified clinician

Don't you lose really users by making it easy for bots to complete a sign up, but hard for humans?

It's not much to go on by, but I kinda feel ya. I think one exception I'd perhaps make is doing a large mechanic refactor. I find them incredibly daunting. So, I'll just ask AI for that. I mean it probably takes me a similar time to do, but it feels less daunting.

I've been trying to get into agentic coding and there are non-refactoring instances where I might reac for it (like any time I need to work on something using tailwind; I'm dyslexic and I'd get actual headaches, not exaggerating, trying to decipher Tailwind gibberish while juggling their docs before AIs came around)

If I'm very tired (after I had insomnia for two or so days) I have mild hallucinations, and they're pretty boring/benign. But mine are more auditory than visual.

This isn't unusual when people are sleep deprived though. I think lots of people just don't realise they are hallucinating in that state

"Be gay; do crimes" has a new twist

The thing is, the development timeline is so compressed that you lose intimate knowledge of the codebase. Like, I don't think humans can form memories that detailed that quickly? Maybe it's just a me problem though. Anyway, so when you need to debug or fix stuff, AI's reasoning will be "welp makes sense, I suppose" and your mental mood of the codebase is now slippery. Eventually there comes a time where at best you can draw an incoherent high-level diagram of the architecture.

And AIs solution to problem is generally "more of the same" to fix it. It rarely looks at fixing design problems

Memory _is_ data at the level Rust works. It just has a few abstractions in the stdlib that hide this. And the code you highlighted is taking steps in the "let's add abstraction" direction

It frequently gets indentation wrong on projects, then tries to write sed/awk scripts. Can't get it right, then write a python script that reformats the whole file on stdout, makes sure the indentation is correct, then writes requests an edit snippet.

And you might be thinking. Well, you should use a code formatter! But I do!

And then you might say, well surely you forgot to mention it in you AGENTS/CLAUDE file. Nope, it's there, multiple times even in different sections because once was apparently not enough.

And lastly, surely if I'm watching this cursed loop unfold and am approving edits manually, like some bogan pleb, I can steer it easily... Well, let me tell ya... I tried stopping it and injecting hints about the formatter, and it stick for a minute before it goes crazy again. Or sometimes it rereads the file and just immediately fucks up the formatting.

I think when this shit happens, it probably uses like 3x more tokens.

For a Rust project, it recently stated analysing binaries in the target as directory a first instinct, instead of looking at the code...

Good grief.

Honestly, I thought it was a skill issue too, but it just turns out I wasn't using it enough.

I started a new job recently, so I'm asking it a lot of questions about the codebase, sometimes just to confirm my understanding and often it came up with wrong conclusions that would send me down rabbit holes only to find out it was wrong.

On a side project I gave it literally a formula and told it to run it with some other parameters. It was doing its usual "let me get to know the codebase" then a "I have a good understanding of the codebase" speech, only to follow it up with "what you're asking is not possible" I'm like... No, I know it's possible I implemented it already, just use it in more places only to get the same "o ye ur right, I missed that... Blabla"

Yeah, it's gotten pretty bad...

Curious, what do you normally use? I had to write a few timing sensitive MC drivers and the only way I knew how onto do that reliably was using assembly. But granted, it wasn't _often_, just more than I expected (especially for someone who doesn't normally do that low level stuff, this was for an art project)

Yes, and to add, in case it's not obvious: in my experience the maintenance, mental (and emotional costs, call me sensitive) cost of bad code compounds exponentially the more hacks you throw at it

I have been doing this for years, especially for libraries (internal or otherwise), anything that's `pub`/`export`, or gnarly logic that makes the intent not obvious. Not _everything_ is documented, but most things are.

I'm doing it because I know how much I appreciate well-written documentation. Also this is a bit niche, but if you're using Rust and add examples to doc-comments, they get run as tests too.

Also given we both managed to produce more than one sentence, and include capital letters in our comments, it's entirely possible both of us will be accused of being an AI. Because, you know... People don't write like this, right?

There's many JS implementations out there. Quality kind depends on what you need, and there's some engines more or less complete in which quirks are supported.

And for example, v8 doesn't make much sense in embedded contexts

Random aside: I've seen a 2015 game be accused of AI slop on Steam because it used a similar concept... And mind you, there's probably thousands of games that do this.

First it was punctuation and grammar, then linguistic coherence, and now it's tiny bits of whimsy that are falling victim to AI accusations. Good fucking grief

I know this is a spicy take, but it probably just means you're more eloquent in your writing than most netizens...

And that's not really a hard bar to clear if you look at how people write comments online (including places like GitHub).

Anyone that uses punctuation, and capitalises words, probably automatically gets past the 70% confidence line.

I recently battled this and reverted to using DOM measurements. In my case the measurement would be off by around a pixel, which caused layout issues if I tried rendering the text in DOM. This was only happening on some Linux and Android setups

To be fair, early wine (when I first tried it) wasn't very usable, and for gaming specifically. So if you were an early enthusiast adopter, you might've just experienced their growing pains.

Also, I assume some Windows version jumps didn't make things easy for Wine either lol

Oh, this is news to me! I've used Krita to pain (recreational noob, not on a professional level) and I never realised this. I'll play with this tomorrow

Most of the transfors you describe are still unfortunately destructive (ie the only way to go back is to undo). I'm not an expert on this, but I think the only way this could be key framed would be to take snapshots of the pixels and insert the modified raster data as keyframes? I'm not sure there's a good/correct/obviously way to interpolate betweens say a before and after liquefy operation the way it currently works. Maybe some of them coul store brush+inputs (pressure, cursor movement, etc) but that seems difficult to work with as an artist. Again, not done much animation (as a dev or artist) so maybe I'm just out of the loop completely

But yeah I agree with you in principle though, it would be nice if these were non-destructive and could be keyframed.

No horse in this race, but your phrasing seems a bit weird, honestly... If reduced, your comments read as:

"You don't know about X? Well, at least I know about X and Y..." Doesn't seemed like a good faith comment to me either?

And then you say "You misunderstood my intentions so I'm going to disengage". For what it's worth, I didn't interpret your argument as insulting someone, but also it wasn't a useful or productive comment either.

What did you hope to achieve with your comments? Was it simply to state how you know something the other person doesn't? What purpose do you think that serves here?

I don't know why you have to qualify your sentence with "think carefully before you respond" it makes it seem like you're setting up some rhetoric trap... But I'll assume it's in good faith? Anyway...

I don't mind if a review is AI-assisted. I've always been a fan of the whole "human in the loop" concept in general. Maybe the AI helps them catch something they'd normally miss or gloss over. Everyone tends to have different priorities when reviewing PRs, and it's not like humans don't have lapses in judgement either (I'm not trying to anthropomorphise AI, but you know what I mean).

My stance is same about writing code. I honestly don't mind if the code was written `ed` on a linux-powered toaster from 2005 with 32x32 screen, or if they wrote it using Claude Code 9000.

At the end of the day, the person who's submitting the code (or signing off a review) is responsible for their actions.

So in a round-about way, to answer your question: I think AI as part of the review is fine. As impressive as their output can be sometimes be, it can be both impressively good and impressively bad. So no, only relying on AI for review is not enough.

If AI writes a for loop the same way you would... Does it automatically mean the code is bad because you—or someone you approve of—didn't write it? What is the actual argument being made here? All code has trade offs, does AI make a bad cost/benefit analysis? Hell yeah it does. Do humans make the same mistake? I can tell you for certain they do, because at least half of my career was spent fixing those mistakes... Before there ever was an LLM in sight. So again... What's the argument here? AI can produce more code, so like more possibility for fuck up? Well, don't vibe code with "approve everything" like what are we even talking about? It's not the tool it's the users, and as with any tool theres going to be misuse, especially new and emerging ones lol

The PR touched a lot of internals, including module code and mirrors the fs APIs. So, yes it was big, but the commit history was largely clean and followed a development story, and it was tested. The code quality was decent too. I didn't review all of it because I don't have a personal stake in this though.

I suggest EVERYONE in this thread go read the the GitHub PR in question. There's some good arguments for and against AI, and what it means for FOSS... But good lord you will have to sift through the virtue signalling bullshit and have patience for the constant moving of goalposts

But it's a reimplementation... So it's new code, their code. Can't they license it? Only the project name and the API surface remained similar